


Left Handed

by ivyblossom



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-07-15
Updated: 2002-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-10 14:05:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyblossom/pseuds/ivyblossom





	Left Handed

She watches you from across the room. No doubt you don’t notice; you are busy with your magical numbers and your equations, your lip has a black smudge on it where you accidentally laid the tip of your quill while you were thinking. Your hair falls forward while your hand whizzes across the page, scratching so loud she can hear it from six rows over, distinct from the scrabblings of the others, even from across the room. Your lips move when you write, just a little, as if you need to say the words to have them make sense but have learned to stop yourself, almost. She finds this strangely hypnotizing, and sometimes tries to make out what you’re writing. It never works.

She watches you write and sees that you are unique among your friends. All of them are right handed but you; your left elbow nudges against their arms and spills their ink but you don’t notice. You are writing something true and real and right and no one’s elbow or glare or exasperated sigh can stop you. At the end of every day your left hand, from your little finger down to your wrist, is coated with ink. Quills were never designed for the left handed.

She hears your voice all the time. She knows that it’s probably because she’s listening for it, but it seems that you have the kind of voice that travels. She hears you in the morning on the way to breakfast, sometimes scolding your friends over their half-done homework, sometimes deadly serious and whispering things she knows she isn’t meant to hear. She has learned a great deal about you from those whispers, from the hurried “meet you by the restricted section!” and “has he got your invisibility cloak?” to the cryptic “I’m scared.”

People think you’re so stuffy and stuck up, but she knows better. She has followed you some nights when you sneak out of your dorm, when you crawl along behind furniture and sneak into places you’re not supposed to be. She knows about how you use polyjuice on occasion; once, you turned yourself into a Blaise Zabini and came innocently into the Slytherin dorm. She wondered what you were looking for, if you were there to check on her, see if she is a spy.

There is something funny about polyjuice. It leaves a smell, a faint trace of something sharp, like juniper or pine needles. Her mother taught her this, taught her to beware of that smell. Once when she was twelve her father came into her room to kiss her goodnight smelling sharp like juniper and rubbing alcohol and she screamed. It was only gin that time, too much of it too, but the smell had burned a brand in her memory.

Blaise Zabini, wandering into the common room with a feminine gait, smelling faintly of juniper. You even pushed back non-existent hair as you settled back onto the couch. When she tossed a quill at you and you caught it with your left hand, she was sure. And no Slytherin would start a conversation the way you did. “Pansy,” you said slowly, “I’m sorry to disturb you, can we talk?” The voice was his but the words were yours, the staccato diction.

She’s not sure what she wants from you. Even if she wants anything at all. Oh, it’s not so strange, is it? She was kissing girls when she was nine years old, there’s nothing strange in that. You haven’t lived if you’ve never felt a girl’s lips against yours. When she was fourteen at her parents cottage the girls in the neighbourhood would get together along the docks at night. They would talk about boys, swim out into the water within the boundaries determined by lanterns at intervals, pull the straps of their swim suits down and touch each other under the water. And there was one girl, whose name she doesn’t think about anymore, just, that one girl, who stayed with her longer than the rest, the one who taught her how to kiss boys by demonstration. Taught her something about fingers, pressure, rhythm. Damp neck under her lips, a muffled groan that she was sure couldn’t be heard in the darkness. _Not that it means anything_.

But now she doesn’t know. She stands in the hallway and watches you go by, she smells the faint smell of shampoo and sandalwood that clings to you, watches you stop to pull your sock up your calf. There’s a fierceness to you that interests her; in the evenings she sits in the common room with the other girls and feels a kind of brokenness that she never senses in you, a meekness. They talk about boys, about class, who’s got a crush on who. She tells them that Draco is such a dear, do you know what he did this time? They always want to know, all the details. She tells them about their marriage plans, where the honeymoon might be; sometimes she tells them how he kisses, but she doesn’t offer to show them. They’re jealous and she enjoys it. They ask her about sex and she tells them whatever they want to know, sort of absently, as if she doesn’t care what they know. Most of the time she doesn’t.

Another day, another class, another book, another quill snapped in her hands, she borrows one from you. She tries to think about what you might look like naked, and can’t. _Mudblood purity, the good girl, the smart girl, perfectly decent asexuality, not even your friends remember that you can come. They jerk off to pictures of movie stars and pretty Asian girls and never think about you. _She wonders what you think about when your fingers are between your legs, and then wonder if they ever are. Maybe Mudbloods keep themselves vaccum sealed, taken out for cleaning and that’s it. You certainly give off that impression. Your friends are drooling over stupid girls, pretty girls, girls with red lipstick on and blonde hair, girls like her, not you. Most of the time you don’t seem to care. Sometimes you look hurt. She understands it, but she thinks you’ve got the better deal.

Today you have tried to look pretty, that much is obvious. Your hair is straightened and the sides braided up; you are wearing a tiny bit of makeup, you are trying to smile more, to bat your eyelashes, to be cute and coy. It’s all about pretending to be the girl you’re not. She can see it. When she hears you giggle at some stupid joke one of your friends tells, she thinks she’s going to be sick. _This isn’t the way, _she wants to tell you. _This isn’t you. _Though she has no right to say such things, and no reason to know whether or not it’s true, she feels certain that it is. She hates to see you like this, less than you are. Defeated. Most of the time, with most people, she doesn’t care much about things like dignity, but there is something about you that makes her feel the loss when you do this, when you stumble into their expectations and lower your own. She wants to shake you, slap your face, remind you of who you are.

Just before dinner she cornered you, and you, exhausted from a day of play acting, were at a loss for words. You looked up at her with a question, _please, don’t humiliate me today. Just not today._ Your lipstick has worn off and your mascara has left oily marks under your eyes.The rest were gone, she has kept you behind, you can hear forks and knives and laughter from the Great Hall. She puts her hand on your waist, she’s gentle and you’re surprised. She can tell that you’re not sure what she’s doing until she leans in to kiss you. She kisses you and means to say, _don’t let them grind you down, don’t let them turn you into something less than you are. _You are too shocked and too overwhelmed, perhaps, to do other than let her do it. She wonders through dinner if it was shock or pleasure, shock or joy, shock or unspeakable horror. You are unreadable to her, and that’s something about you that she likes. She watches you all through dinner; you are flushed and now she knows what you would look like with your fingers between your legs. There is a small smile on your face, you touch your own lips and look off into space.

There are always ways, and she knows all of them. You think you’re safe, you think your password keeps your enemies out, but it’s cheap security. She sneaks into your room after midnight, expecting you to wake up and scream when she closes the door but you don’t. You keep on sleeping, hair damp under her fingers, a bit of lace around your throat.

There are some people who would be defeated by a boy. She knows she’s not one of them, but she thinks that you are. She saw the beginning of your defeat already; coy eyes, fake giggles, the wrong colour lipstick and awkward colours on your eyelids. It kills you to do these things, and she knows it. She knows what you want; you want to pin your hair back, scrub your face clean, you want to roll your eyes at the stupid antics of your friends, not impress them with your pretty legs. You want wear flat shoes and stand firm, not faint into someone’s arms. You want someone to touch you, without slicing any of yourself off to fit through some ideal cut out of a woman. _Woman. _She imagines that it’s not a word you would even use for yourself.

She climbs into your bed with you and you shift, sleepily. Your eyes open when she sides her hand under your nightgown and strokes your stomach. You looks at her but she can’t read your expression. She kisses you on your clavicle, slides her hand upward to stroke your breasts. The soft sound you make, the way you lightly arch your back, confirms something she has always believed about you, something you don’t know about yourself.

As she kisses you she imagines you kissing a boy, parting your thighs to let him in, cringing a little as he punches his way inside of you and doesn’t notice your pain. She imagines you rinsing the blood out of the sheets later, crying, not able to get the stains out, feeling empty and torn apart. This is now what she wants for you.


End file.
